Sensory Play

What’s so special about sensory activities?

A few minutes on Instagram or Pinterest will leave you convinced that messy play with jelly and trays full of cornflakes and pom-poms are toddler essentials.

But many people get sensory play wrong.

You don’t need any special equipment. There’s nothing complicated to set up.

You can take that coloured rice out of your eBay basket.

Sensory play is about using the senses, plain and simple. It’s about deep learning and trying new things.

Learning with all the senses

We take in information about the world through our senses. Each new experience allows our brains to gather more data. The richer the experience, the more detailed the information.

Over time we become better at tackling new activities. We can call on our prior knowledge to guide us. Outcomes are less unexpected and we are less wary of tastes and textures.

How do we build up this knowledge? Through sensory play.

The eight senses

Yes, that’s right, eight.

We all know the first five. But there are three more:

Vestibular sense. This is our sense of balance. Without it babies couldn’t learn to walk and preschoolers would never ride a bike.

Proprioception. The awareness of the position of our bodies in space. For example, in a completely dark room, we would still know where our limbs were and the shape our hands made.

Interoception. The awareness of what is going on inside our bodies. Do we feel hot or cold? Do we need to go to the toilet? This sense is important for potty training!

Over the coming weeks, we’ll look at them all, starting today with touch.

The tactile sense

My youngest wouldn’t put her feet on the sand when we went to the beach. As I lowered her to the ground, she lifted her legs ever higher, wrapping herself around me, like a baby chimp clinging to its mother.

The feeling of the sand was too much. The sensory experience was overwhelming.

What was going on here? And what could I do to help?

Why is the tactile sense important?

Can you imagine holding a pencil or a fork or doing up a zip without a sense of touch? How would you find the light switch in the dark?

The tactile sense helps us to do two things – to know what we’re touching and to touch it in an appropriate way:

1. Tactile discrimination Can you put your hand in your pocket and pull out a coin rather than your key? That’s tactile discrimination.

2. Tactile modulation Whereas most children enjoy the feeling of sand beneath their feet, some recoil altogether, not wanting to touch it at all. And there are others who can’t get enough: they pour it all over themselves and roll around getting thoroughly covered. Tactile modulation is about having an appropriate response to sensory input – not too much and not too little. We achieve it by exposing our children to a variety of sensory experiences in a non-threatening way.

Tactile defensiveness

That jumper is too itchy! Those socks are too bobbly! Some children seemingly overreact to sensations that others can ignore.

Help your child to tolerate discomfort by introducing mess and new textures as early as possible. For babies, that means a variety of new foods and eating with fingers. For toddlers and preschoolers, it means messy play.

Let your child stay messy

Your child’s face is covered with food; her arms are elbow deep in mud. It’s tempting to clean her up straight away.

But, whenever possible, allow her to stay in this disheveled state. Children who don’t learn that it’s OK to feel a bit sticky and dirty can start to recoil from mess. This deprives them of the chance to develop their tactile sense.

The activities

I’m not a big fan of mess in the house. It’s not that I can’t handle it, I just think it’s not necessary. So many of the sensory activities you’ll see on Pinterest require you to spend hours in preparation with a big clean-up at the end. OK, it might have been fun for your child but was the fun and the learning proportionate to the time you spent doing it?

Overly complicated activities

You signed up to A Year With My Child for activities, so I’m going to give you some. But by now you understand that my goal with this course is that you learn to skip the activities altogether and come up with your own. As long as you engage with the theory a little, you’ll have no trouble doing this. For example, once you understand that tactile discrimination is an important skill to cultivate, you don’t need me to tell you how to do it. I could give you an activity that calls for a tray of dried rice and lego bricks but if you understand the rationale behind it, you’ll realise that the split peas and cous cous in your cupboard will serve just as well. And that, actually, you can get the same result feeling through sand on the beach for buried shells.

Tactile activities

Sensory bins

You may have noticed that there are a lot of confused people on the internet.

Sensory bins are a case in point.

They are simply trays, boxes or bowls containing something that is interesting to touch.

If you research sensory bins, you’ll see lots filled with toys and scoops. This is also OK, but it’s not a sensory bin, it’s small world play or a fine motor workout. If you’re doing this for a sensory workout, you’ll have to rethink.

Let’s keep this simple: You can put anything in a sensory bin as long as it’s safe for your child. If they’re too young to eat it, don’t put it in. The same goes for non-food items while your child is still at the mouthing stage.

I know you’re here for activities but, honestly, you’ll get all the sensory input you need outside. Sit in mud, sand or gravel. Eat with your fingers. The important thing is to get used to a degree of discomfort. This feels icky; that feels scratchy. But I’m going to stick with it because it’s fun.

Sensory bin ideas

There’s a lot you can do with sensory bins. Here’s a basic skill progression:

1. The most basic of all is simply a tray filled with water and splash about. Add bubbles or colour for interest.
2. After that you can fill it with single materials such as sand, jelly, ​oobleck​, slime.
3. The next stage is to add hidden items to aid with tactile discrimination. Coins buried in mud; peas in mashed potato, plastic figures in sand. Increase the challenge by adding objects that are difficult to distinguish from one another. A large, hard marble is easy to feel for inside a pot of slime. Feeling for lentils in a bowl of rice is much trickier. If your child is amenable (she probably won’t be unless she is closer to three years old) blindfold her or cover her eyes with your hands. Now can she find the hidden objects?

You can add figures and create small scenes, turning your sensory bin into a small world activity, but remember that toddlers are still developing their ability to represent symbolically (i.e. use their imaginations), so they are likely to use the figures and vehicles in a purely physical way, bashing and rolling, piling and posting. This is perfectly normal.

Feely bag

Fill a bag with familiar objects. Put your hand inside and see if you can guess what it is you are touching. Can you find the ball? Can you find the figure? Is there anything squishy in there? Can you find something that’s crinkly?

With preschoolers, you would fill this with basic shapes like squares, circles and triangles. Can you identify the shape by its features?

Feely bags are a great tool and you can modify this activity for older children and use it for years to come.

Sensory feet

Like a sensory bin, but for your feet. Weird, I know, but it’s a great confidence booster. Your child gets used to putting her feet in materials that feel strange. Can she resist the urge to pull them out?

Imagine you are standing in front of a stretch of deep, squelchy mud. Now imagine yourself taking your shoes off and stepping into it in bare feet. Perhaps just the thought of it makes you squirm. This is likely to be your child’s first response when you ask her to do this, so be gentle if she is reluctant to engage. You might have to put your own foot in first!

Try cornflakes, slime, sand and gravel – and take care to hold onto something stable!

Packaging

Does your toddler like to rummage through packaging? Polystyrene is a well-known danger but corn-starch packing peanuts – the non-toxic alternative – are fun to rummage through and make an excellent base for tactile discrimination activities. Bubble wrap is equally fun. Just remember that these are not toys and have not been safety tested. You have to be present at all times. Never allow your child to chew bubble wrap.

Tuff spots

Fill a tuff spot with foam, jelly, cooked pasta or anything else that will provide a rich sensory experience. Strip your child off and let her climb in.

It’s messy. I’ve done it with my own toddlers indoors. And I strongly recommend you get the bath ready first. But it’s brilliant fun.

Tip: put a sheet underneath to catch any spills and minimise the clean-up.

You can also fill the tuff spot with sand, mud or pebbles, but anything on the messier end of the spectrum should be done outside – especially if your child is fond of throwing!

Finger paint

Make your own completely safe finger paint by cooking and puréeing colourful vegetables. Your aim is not to create brilliant colours that make beautiful marks on the page. This is a tactile activity first and foremost. The highchair tray works perfectly well. There’s no need to use paper.

Of course, you can also use non-toxic finger paints. Your child is at an age when she is happy to simply enjoy the feeling of swishing her arms and making marks on the page. We’ll cover ‘drawing’ in a later module but, for now, it’s enough to know that you shouldn’t expect anything representational. It’s not until your child reaches preschool age that she will produce anything that looks like a picture.

A sensory table

Depending on your child’s age, you might consider making a sensory table. It’s just like the nature table you remember from the classroom of your childhood but with objects focusing on one particular sense. Rough, smooth, sratchy, spiky; bark, horse chestnuts, moss, grass.

Talk to your child about the objects. The relevant vocabulary arises naturally. The grass is floppy; the stone is hard. You are giving her the words and the sensations to make sense of the experience.

Screen time…

When you’re on a screen, you’re not developing your sense of touch or smell, balance or proprioception. Just like a pint of beer is dead calories – pleasant enough but nutritionally empty – so is an iPad a sensory wilderness.

That’s not to say all screen time is bad. As we saw last week, a few minutes on YouTube singing along with nursery rhymes can be highly beneficial. But there are only so many hours in the day. If you’re spending all of them in front of a screen, it’s at the cost of more interesting experiences.

Sensory play outside

For all kinds of reasons, it’s not always possible to get outside, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring nature into our homes. With the usual caveats about safety, consider keeping a box full of the following:

• pine cones
• bark
• leaves
• sticks
• pebbles
• flowers
• pine needles
• mud

It’s easy to incorporate them into sensory bin play or simply as objects of wonder in their own right. And they’re so much more interesting than plastic.

Summary

• Sensory modulation is the ability to react appropriately to sensory input. That means not over- or under-responding. The more sensory experiences we have, the better are at handling them. We are less likely to recoil at touching slime or hearing loud noises.
• Too much sensory input can be overwhelming for children. They must learn to regulate (i.e. modulate) it.
• Use sensory bins or their equivalents to develop tactile discrimination, our sense of touch.
• You don’t need any fancy resources. Just make sure to offer a variety of experiences.

Final word

I’m not into the Paleo diet and I don’t walk around barefoot, but I do think that it’s useful to think about how our ancestors lived. How did their babies learn to use all their senses? In a time before sensory bins and toys with flashing lights, they did just fine. A bit of outdoor play, some mud, sticky faces and hands. Toddling about on the grass and in the woods, tactile discrimination activities were easy to come by.

Sensory bins are fun – and can provide a useful distraction on a rainy afternoon – but you don’t have to offer them all the time. As long as you remember why they are important, you’ll strike the right balance.

Today’s lesson in one sentence?

Find a muddy puddle and sit in it.